Reminders of Him

by Colleen Hoover

I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.

People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.

“I miss you all the time, even when we’re together.”

She seems like a quiet person, but not the shy kind of quiet. She’s quiet in a fierce way—a storm that sneaks up on you, and you don’t know it’s there until you feel the thunder rattle your bones.

I have a daughter I have never held. She has a scent I have never smelled. She has a name I have never yelled. She has a mother who has already failed. Love, Kenna

Time heals all wounds, right? Except I didn’t leave them with a simple wound. I left them with a casualty. One so heartbreaking there’s a possibility it will never be forgiven.

In a perfect world, they’ll open their front door for me and allow me to reunite with the daughter I’ve never held. In a perfect world . . . their son would still be alive.

“They took your baby from you. You won’t ever get over that. So, you decide right now, right here. Are you gonna live in your sadness or are you gonna die in it?”

My normal would never be the same. It hadn’t been the same since I lost you, and losing our daughter to your parents just pushed me even further from center. The way I felt when they took her from me back then is the exact same defeated misery I feel right now.

Some things can be forgiven, but sometimes an action is so painful the memory of it can still crush a person ten years down the road.

I know from experience that if you’re going to grow up with an imperfect mother, it’s better to grow up knowing your imperfect mother is fighting for you than to grow up knowing she doesn’t give a shit about you.

had this fantasy that you would someday propose to me and then we’d get married and have babies and raise them together in this town because you loved it here, and I would have loved anywhere you wanted to be. But you died, and we didn’t get to live out our dream. And now we never will, because life is a cruel, cruel thing, the way it picks and chooses who to bully. We’re given these shitty circumstances and told by society that we, too, can live the American dream. But what they don’t tell us is that dreams almost never come true. It’s why they call it the American dream rather than the American reality.

“I was alone a lot,” I said. “She always made sure I had food, but she neglected me to the point I was put in foster care twice. Both times they sent me back to live with her, though. It’s like she was shitty, but not shitty enough. I think after growing up and seeing other families, I started to realize she wasn’t a good mother. Or even a good person. It became really hard to coexist. It was like she felt I was her competition and not on her team. It was exhausting. After I moved out, we stayed in touch for a while, but then she just stopped calling. And I stopped calling her. We haven’t spoken in two years.”

“What was it like having a good family?” I asked him. “I’m not sure I knew how good it was until just now,” he replied. “Yes, you did. You love your parents. And this house. I can tell.” He smiled gently. “I don’t know if I can explain it. But being here . . . it’s like I can be my truest, most authentic self. I can cry. I can be in a bad mood, or sad, or happy. Any of those moods are accepted here. I don’t feel that anywhere else.”

Girls like me just didn’t seem to fit in with any family.

I feel like Kenna’s monster and Diem’s protector.

“Sometimes I wonder what Scotty would think if he could see us. It makes me hope that an afterlife doesn’t exist, because if it does, Scotty is probably the only sad person in heaven.”

I never could have imagined what it would be like for a mother to lay eyes on her child for the first time. The sight of Diem on the screen steals Kenna’s breath. She slaps a hand over her mouth and begins to cry. She cries so hard, she has to set the phone on her legs so she can use her shirt to clear her eyes of tears. Kenna becomes a different person right in front of my eyes. It’s as if I’m witnessing her become a mother. It might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

It’s not that difficult to love a child you gave birth to, even if you’ve never laid eyes on them. But it’s extremely difficult to finally see what they look like and sound like and are like, and then be expected to just walk away from that.

“Regret keeps you stuck on pause. So does prison. When you get out of here, make sure you hit play so you don’t forget to move forward.”

“I was shattered, Ledger. You have to believe that. Too shattered to even defend myself, or care what happened to my life. I wasn’t unemotional, I was broken.”

Ledger keeps us wrapped tightly together when he says, “In a matter of a few weeks, I went from hating you to liking you to wanting the world for you, so forgive me if those feelings sometimes overlap.” I relate to that more than he knows. I sometimes want to scream at him for having been a wall between me and my daughter, but at the same time, I want to kiss him for loving her enough to be a wall of protection for her.

It’s one thing for him to admit he wants me to meet her, but he took it a million steps further by saying he wants her to be like me. It’s the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.

It is what it is. A fucked-up situation, with no evil people to blame. We’re all just a bunch of sad people doing what we have to do to make it until tomorrow. Some of us sadder than others. Some of us more willing to forgive than others.

Grudges are heavy, but for the people hurting the most, I suppose forgiveness is even heavier.

her. I know she’s a good person. A good person who had one bad night. It happens to the best of us. The worst of us. All of us. Some of us are just luckier than others, and our bad moments have fewer casualties.

You kissed me in the water like it was the last time you would ever kiss me. I wonder if you had some sort of fear, or premonition, and that’s why you kissed me the way you did. Or maybe I only remember it so well because it was our last kiss.

There was before you and there was during you. For some reason, I never thought there would be an after you. But there was, and I was in it. I’ll be in it forever.

Everyone wanted justice, and sadly, justice and empathy couldn’t both fit inside that courtroom.

I feel like a weight has been lifted. It’s not the weight of the anchor that keeps me tethered under the surface—that won’t be lifted until I get to hold my daughter. But a small portion of my pain has attached to his sympathy, and it feels like he’s physically lifting me up for air, allowing me a few minutes to breathe.

His kisses feel like both forgiveness and promises. I imagine mine feel like apologies to him, because he keeps coming back for more every time we separate.

We all knew Scotty, but we all knew him in different ways. We all carry different memories of him.

“We both keep going back and forth. You worry, and then I worry, and then you worry, but the worry won’t solve this. I feel like this isn’t going to end well. Or maybe it will. Either way, we like being with each other, so until it ends well or ends terribly, I don’t really want to waste our time together going in circles about a future we can’t predict. So just get me naked and make love to me.”

Maybe he’ll say something to them that will plant a seed, and that seed will grow and grow until they start to feel empathy for me.

“The only thing you can do at this point is go over there and apologize to them. Diem needs you. As much as it hurts, if they can’t move past what I did to them, it isn’t your job to repair or mend what’s broken inside of them. It’s your job to support them, and you can’t do that with me in your life.”

There are people who find peace in forgiveness, and then there are others who look at forgiveness as a betrayal.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all born with equal amounts of good and evil. What if no one person is more or less malevolent than another, and that we all just release our bad at different times, in different ways?

It proves that time, distance, and devastation allow people enough opportunity to craft villains out of people they don’t even know. But Kenna was never a villain. She was a victim. We all were.

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether something is a coincidence or a sign. Maybe the best way to cope with the loss of the people we love is to find them in as many places and things as we possibly can. And in the off chance that the people we lose are still somehow able to hear us, maybe we should never stop talking to them.

Now that I’ve forgiven myself, the reminders of him only make me smile.